Another lovely grab bag of comics from my Comic Art Masterclass travels in April. From Guildford to Chipping Barnet to Chacombe in Oxfordshire.
The good children who attended my classes at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford not only came up with these smashing comics but also had parents who bought lots of my books afterwards. I'm not saying I should play in lots more well to do home counties middle class towns, but it wouldn't hurt.
Chipping Barnet in North London is somewhere that's had me back a number of times and always delivers a good crowd of kids. Whose parents also buy books, bish bash bosh. I now realise I sound totally mercenary. Not at all. It's all about the culture, honest.
Chacombe Primary school is in Oxfordshire, but awfully close to the Northamptonshire border, which has led me to notice I've been doing an awful lot of classes in or near Northamptonshire in the last six months. I must make a note of when I emailed them all, and make sure I pick that date again to email schools. (I just checked, it was Jan 2025. So, more start-of-year emails next year, eh).
The celebrities these six groups chose to appear in my demonstration strip were King Charles, Sherlock Holmes, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Cristiano Ronaldo and Strawberry (the nickname of one of the pupils).
Because no one asked, and apropos of nothing, here are in my opinion 5 Things Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who did better than Russell T Davies 2.0
Now first I have to make it absolutely clear that I think Chris Chibnall is a seriously flawed TV writer whose plots collapse, whose dialogue is atrocious, and whose Doctor Who run had me pulling my hair out in frustration time after time. The things he did wrong have been covered many times (fans and critics will discuss endlessly his open-ended still-to-be-finished Timeless Child ideas, much of which I liked in principle, and I devoted entire blogs to rubbish like The Tsuranga Conundrum) but I’d like to champion the things that I think he got right, that RTD’s 2.0 series hasn’t.
1) The titles - The Chibnall opening titles were the best of the century, for me. The globular design exploding out in a nebulous abstract shape was the nearest the show has come to the enigmatic “waves” design of the Hartnell days, echoed by the spiral design of the Pertwee years. RTD in contrast has gone back to the Tardis flying through clouds - which it doesn’t do, it dematerialises and rematerialises - and those clouds give off lightning, which makes them very mundane, a design that was introduced for Matt Smith and which I didn’t like then.
2) The theme music - Segin Akinola’s treatment is creepy and futuristic, a fabulous reimagining of Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire’s original. The orchestral version, that RTD has returned to, was novel in 2005, and has a cinematic feel, but I feel is getting old and lacks the mood of Jodie Whittaker’s theme music.
3) The single storyline season - Flux was flawed, of course it was, it was written by Chris Chibnall who has difficulty sticking the landing. But it showed great ambition, as all Chibnall’s stories did, and most importantly it had the structure that, done correctly, works best in television right now. The multi-episode story that keeps the viewer gripped and returning. In fairness, I am a great advocate of “story of the week” shows, two of my Top Ten TV Of this year look like being Black Mirror and Poker Face. But there’s no denying that the shows Doctor Who is competing with right now - Stranger Things, Wednesday, Reacher, Loki etc - they’re all single storylines. And Doctor Who, in its distant past, was characterised by its long stories punctuated by iconic cliffhangers. So I feel that’s something it could look at again.
4) The soap opera - When it started, I described Chibnall’s Doctor Who as “Call The Midwife with Daleks”, and this seems to have been his intention. To be a family-friendly light drama show, with science fiction in. When he got it right, for example the relationship between The Doctor and Yaz, it was beautiful, and fans have really been drawn into that. This of course was the defining characteristic of Russell T Davies’s first run on the show. He brought a Coronation Street sensibility to Doctor Who, centring it around Rose and her family and maintaining a realistic Earth-bound heart to the show, that continued through the Martha and Donna seasons. Throughout the Chibnall years, though as I’ve said the writing let it down constantly, he kept the Tardis companions rooted, in Sheffield and Liverpool largely, and gave them a relatable world which, if we bought into it, chimed with our own world and made it feel like the aliens were threatening us. RTD 2.0 in contrast had the quasi-mysterious Ruby Sunday who lives in a vague any town with a family who feel made up, an enigmatic neighbour who pops up everywhere in the universe, and on balance more nonsense than sense. RTD 2.0 has lost the grip on reality that RTD 1.0 introduced to Docto Who. (So I guess this paragraph is about things that RTD did better than RTD)
5) The casting - I hate to say it, but I continue to struggle with Ncuti Gatwa. His delivery is not as crisp or as gripping as other actors in the role. I regularly find myself imagining what that line would have sounded like with Jodie Whittaker or Christopher Eccleston doing it, and I just find them winning. Jodie was robbed. Chibnall’s dialogue was so awful, that the exposition-dumps and problem-solving-spiels that she was obliged to spew out were a waste of her talent. Watching her in the likes of Time and Toxic Town since have reminded us what a great Doctor she should have been. Oh and talking of Ncuti - that tear. That bloody tear! The tear that has to drip down his face in every sodding episode. It’s become like when, as a kid, I’d watch The Incredible Hulk with Bill Bixby and you’d be waiting for the time he’d turn into the Hulk. It’d be twice every episode, regular as clockwork, scheduled to fit between ad breaks. And after not very long it got old. Ncuti’s tear has done that very quickly. I can tell you what I won’t be shedding when he stops doing that.
There you go. Not contentious opinions, I’m sure. Just some I wanted to get down on paper, probably because I have so much proper work to be getting on with.
And for the record, they both have the worst Tardis interiors ever. Fact.
PS: The Outfit. I've just remembered how good Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who costume is. I've seen more people dressed as her at comicons in the last couple of years than probably any other Doctor (though Sylvester McCoy gets a lot of dressing-up-box love I must say). I have yet to see someone dressed as Ncuti, and which outfit would you choose anyway? I must reiterate, I have been enjoying the Ncuti Gatwa series, I think Boom and Lux are classics. But I'm being picky, cos it's what we do.
As I celebrate a year since I wised up and stopped drawing caricatures for free at comic cons - how mad was I, giving away my goods for nothing? - I've just started offering my caricatures for nothing again.
Hear me out. My latest initiative, inspired by a conversation with Stuart Gould last week, who is doing live appearances at bookshops with his kids book Nuts, is to do live appearances at bookshops. It may not work, no shops may want me sullying their premises, but the notion is that I can offer the same attraction that I use to get people to stop at my comic con tables, the free caricatures, and use it to drag people into bookshops.
I know I got smart and realised I could charge just two quid per caricature at live events and make myself more money (it stopped people taking advantage, and nets me a good hundred quid per event), and maybe that is something I might reintroduce to this arrangement, if indeed it even takes off. But for now, as an enticement to get people through the door, I'm starting off by offering my wares for free in the hope that they then take a fancy to the books.
So many unknowns here. Like: will bookshops be interested in self published books? Will they be happy getting them direct from me, or me selling them and giving them a slice? I honestly don't know. But I've designed the flyer for them, and today emailed about 60 independent bookshops in South Wales, Bristol, and a 50 mile radius around. Because it's Easter Monday there'll be no replies, either way, until at least tomorrow.
